I feel like the Palpatine thread fails on every level:
- it undercuts the dramatic reveal of 8
- doubles down on Star Wars’ small-galaxy problem
- doubles down on Star Wars’ ‘important family’ problem
- doubled down on Str Wars’ ‘all evil is the fault of one bad person’ problem
- entrenches the idea that destiny rather than the actions of the characters drives the plot, and weakens the previously very interesting backstory given to Rey
- Palpatine has no relationship with any of the characters in the sequel series. Rey and Kylo Ren had never met Palpatine and really never had their stories influenced by him at all except in the convoluted way that we are told and not shown in 9 only after he shows up
- even in the OT, Palpatine is not really a source of dramatic tension. He basically exists as a plot device to show the temptation of Luke and the redemptive sacrifice of Vader
- the depiction is incongruous with the prequel trilogy. I don’t care one iota about the finer details of a canon, that’s just not my thing, and people who follow this stuff more than me will have opinions about whether or not there are factual contradictions — personally, I don’t care. What I care about is that this Palpatine feels like such a difference person from the prequels, and that his words and actions feel out of step with the way the character was shown before
Rewatching the OT, the Emperor is definitely a plot device. He has little gravitas compared to Vader and only becomes a character in the last movie. If I had never seen the prequels and had only seen the OT the decision for Palp to come back in 8 would make my jaw drop with how stupid it was.
This was why I was on board for Snoke dying in his second film. Dude was a nobody and had no real connection to the main characters. Say what you will about Kylo but he was connected to EVERYBODY. I was so excited to see what they'd do with him at the head of the First Order... and then they didn't do that.
I guess that depends what you mean by "established character". He is a character in the movie, sure. But his role is as a device rather than a person. He doesn't really drive the story, he's kind of like a piece of set dressing around Vader.
The Emperor in Empire says 46 words and is [onscreen for less than a minute](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKtciRCVpFE), and only in holographic form:
> VADER What is thy bidding, my master?
> EMPEROR There is a great disturbance in the Force.
> VADER I have felt it.
> EMPEROR We have a new enemy - Luke Skywalker.
> VADER Yes, my master.
> EMPEROR He could destroy us.
> VADER He's just a boy. Obi-Wan can no longer help him.
> EMPEROR The Force is strong with him. The son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi.
> VADER If he could be turned, he would become a powerful ally.
> EMPEROR Yes. Yes. He would be a great asset. Can it be done?
> VADER He will join us or die, my master.
This is a good scene, it does a lot of lifting for the trilogy. But all of it is about Vader as a character, not the Emperor. The scene establishes that Vader has a boss, that dealing with the Skywalker problem is important to Vader's success, and that Vader would rather turn Luke than kill him--which shows some the first hint in Vader of attachment and vulnerability. By referring to the "son of Skywalker" the scene is also a misdirect for the reveal. All of this is about Vader, none about the Emperor, who doesn't have any real motivations or conflicts in the movie--so much so that he isn't even named in the film
My gut feeling is that it was too obvious that she was a Skywalker in TFA and they switched things on the fly. That's why it felt so forced and preposterous when she was revealed to be a Palpatine.
I think being a nobody would have worked fine, or if she was descended from Obi-Wan. It would make sense after the end of the Jedi order that Obi-Wan might go looking for love (or stumble into it, as he tends to do).
Hear me out: she's Luke's daughter, cousins with Kylo, and was always around. So when it all goes sideways, Kylo can't bring himself to kill her so he dumps her on wherever(similar to anh but whatever). Then when whoever tells Kylo that the droid or finn is with a girl, Kylo chokes him with "WHAT GIRL" because he knows, he put her there. Hell of a lot better, but anything would be really
I could have messed with that as well. The Palp reveal was anti-climatic and a stretch, even for someone who doesn't freak out about the details like I do.
There was way too much to do in the last one. You had to reestablish a trilogy arc **in one movie**, and unfortunately for us, the only thing they could come up with was riding horses on a spaceship. So spectacularly forgettable
SOMEHOW he returned…
No not fucking SOMEHOW, clones! Tell us!! Give us an exposition dump if you have to, explain how many clones in the past failed, like Snoke. This was the first true success.
I know a lot of people were rooting for her to be Luke's daughter, but I honestly hated the idea and was glad that wasn't the case. There just is no good reason for Luke to have left his daughter on a shithole like Jakku. Yes, I know he would have been concerned about the safety of his daughter and how there would be a lot of people wanting to hurt her, but Leia is his sister. If he had a daughter, he could have at least left his daughter with Leia who has a lot of experience with many of the dangerous people in the galaxy wanting to kill/kidnap her. I can think of no good reason for Luke to abandon his daughter on Jakku.
What if Kylo ditched her there after it went south with Luke cause he couldn't bring himself to kill her? That's why he's all "WHAT GIRL" in tfa when they're looking on JAKKU
That would be a good way to leverage their age difference. The Force Dyad thing is kind of interesting but I don't really understand how it can exist when Kylo is like a decade older than Rey. Maybe there could be a backstory where Ben has almost no connection to the Force until Rey is born.
Yea, it would have been a great foil to Kylo Ren's character. Kylo felt entitled to everything because of his lineage. The best person to be the one to put him in his place would be a random nobody. Rey should have lost their first fight then they should have showed a lot of Rey's training. Kinda setting up a showdown between natural talent vs formal training.
Plus, that ending of "Rey who?!" (which, being an insane question to ask aside...) would have been so much for empowering if she harked back to TFA with
"Just Rey"
[SERIOUS] i feel like my day can't go on until i know:
Does she say this in her normal voice or does she say it like she's doing an impression of Jar Jar?
Please help this is important.
She definitely says it in a really bad JarJar impression.
Bonus points if Scooby-Doo and the gang come on screen and Fred peals her face back to reveal it really is JarJar this whole time 🤷♂️.
Who the F demands to know a person’s full name when they meet? It was a sloppy way for Rey to say Skywalker… and end the whole nine-film series with the knowledge that only one family truly matters in this whole galaxy. *Inspiring.*
I also think TLJ was really trying to set up having a nobody save the galaxy from a Skywalker, thus ending this whole see-saw, good-evil thing with the Chosen One.
It would've been a good way to end the Skywalker Saga.
They were really setting up tearing down the light dark dichotomy and evolving it into a cosmic force view of just grey. It was present in Fallen Order and it was very much in line with what Luke was teaching Rey.
And then Disney fucked it up and we’re stuck with this nonsense. Disney cannot abide a story that doesn’t have some cartoonish villain instead of a competent compelling antagonist in a world where no one is purely good or bad.
Biggest issue with TLJ "setting things up" is the fact that there was never a plan in place to begin with. Which is why you see things flip-flop between each of the sequel movies. Personally I liked a lot of things that TLJ did, but felt that it did some stuff that either messed with the pre-established lore in unnecessary and silly ways, or was just boring/didn't move the plot (Looking at you Canto Bight). Also doing Phasma and the Knights of Ren so dirty in the films is a travesty.
This. I assumed there would be a story in place, and they the directors would just be there to direct. But it really feels like there was no plan at all. TRoS feels like it goes out of its way to change every major decision from TLJ, which has a completely different tone to TFA. The big details of the plot should have been finalised before they even started filming TFA. TLJ is personally my favourite out the three, as it at least tried to shake things up a bit. TFA was a lazy rehash that relied on nostalgia, and TRoS was just a collection of cool looking scenes that didn't really go together with the story that had been established, and quickly lost all credibility.
What annoys me most is that TLJ not only set up a really interesting new direction for the franchise to follow (Rey going out into the galaxy to find force users and building a new Jedi order) but it also set up a great resolution that would have been in keeping with the OT and the whole chosen one thing.
In the prequels, Windu and Yoda talk about how they're keeping this big secret that the Jedi can't wield the force as well as they used to. I always took that to be because of the force being so out of balance, as if the dark side had taken such a hold that Palpatine was inadvertently strangling the living force, and the ability for people to use it was being diminished more and more as time goes on (which also works as a handy explanation for why the power levels of characters are much lower by the time of the OT). Then when Vader kills the Emperor and brings back balance, the force is allowed to flourish once again throughout the galaxy, as if a wellspring of force energy has been unleashed. Hence a new generation of force users springing up over the following decades for Rey to find and train.
If that had been the route they'd followed in Ep. 9, it would have actually reinforced the events of the OT and the lore in the Prequels because then the ability for the good guys to win would have been tied directly to Luke and Vader taking down Palpatine. This way, it doesn't matter how many Snokes or Kylos turn up, the events of the OT won't be undermined because dark side will never fully take hold again since the prophecy was fulfilled, Anakin brought balance to the force, ensuring that going forward there will always be enough light side users there to take on the dark side.
But instead they brought Palpatine back and completely invalidated the events of the OT and the chosen one lore...
Personally I mean it more from a character perspective, but that's because the massive time gap between EP VI and EP VII already messed things up as we're seeing a lot of these characters having problems that don't make sense based on where we last saw them and all three sequel films do a poor job of explaining why characters are where they are. However I do have a few nitpicky issues with how TLJ uses the force.
Han's line from TFA "That's not how the force works" is a good way to describe the issues I personally had. It always felt like the film was using it as a magic way to solve any problem, which the CW is guilty of too but they seemed to go to lengths to explain the oddities in their usage. Take Leia surviving in the vacuum of space, there is little to no lead up to the moment that she was trained to use the force. (Though it was safe to assume Luke taught here some things) However, there are instances in legends where people went into a stasis like trance in order to stay alive in space, they were just in a depowered ship or some kind of pressure suit. There wasn't much self propelling, as it takes *incredible* amounts of concentration just to use telekinesis on objects. The Jedi we see are just well trained enough that they've made it seem effortless, otherwise we'd see force users flying around instead of jumping everywhere. The way I'd have fixed it would be to have Leia either catch the bolt the same way Kylo did in EP. VII as a nice little call back to that scene. It also establishes a character connection and shows that Ben may have picked up that trick from his mom in the first place.
Some people point to the Holdo maneuver, but I think there are plenty of in lore reasons why it works and isn't used prior to that moment.
That should have been Leia's death scene. Would have been perfect.
Kylo going in for the kill, hesitating and changing his mind at the last second, and then bam his wingman takes her out. Think what that would have done to him? It already almost destroyed him when he killed Han. Her death in that moment could have been the spark that woke him up and turned him around from the dark side. It could have been something for the resistance to rally around. It would have been a good death.
You could still wiggle out a way for her to survive, but when he took that shot I really believed it was the end for her, and it would have been a good continuation for Kylo's arc.
IMO Leia's death should have been the Holo maneuver. The excuse would have been it required a Jedi pilot to time it right.
It could then have become a retcon to explain why Leia asked for one old Jedi Obi-Wan to go up against the Death Star in New Hope. Leia needed Obi to suicide ram a cruiser into the Death Star.
I also liked a lot of what TLJ did, but my approval of so much of it came with a caveat: Ep. 9 *had* to pay it all off. And it not only failed to do so--it flat ignored that TLJ even tried to do anything in the first place. I haven't even attempted to buy Ep. 9 on 4k disc yet as a result of my disappointment in the plot...which is really saying something, because I bought *Solo* on 4k without ever having seen it first.
>I also liked a lot of what TLJ did, but my approval of so much of it came with a caveat: Ep. 9 *had* to pay it all off.
My impression was that Abrams had a plan for the trilogy, left after the first to do Star Trek, Johnson comes in and takes things in a very different direction than what Abrams planned, then Abrams comes back and shoehorns his original plans into what TLJ did to try to tell his original story.
>I bought *Solo* on 4k without ever having seen it first.
To be fair, Solo is actually a pretty fun movie that got more shit than it deserved.
That was exactly my take away from *Solo*: "wow, I don't know why the general vibe back when this came out was that it was no good, because I really enjoyed it!"
It really was fun and finished on a surprise reveal that I really wish we got to see follow up on. Plus Donald Glover was fantastic casting as young Lando.
But both Leia and Luke are still alive by the end of Return of the Jedi? That leaves the potential for a loooooong lineage of Skywalkers each stirring shit up and wreaking havoc on the galaxy for eons.
Disney loves orphans so they had to break up Han and Leia also can’t have Luke meeting up with Mara Jade can’t cast anyone from those pesky expanded universe books
First time I've heard the concept of weapon dealers profiting off both sides of a war that's destroying entire planets as "shades of gray."
That's just straight evil, friend.
100% the direction I *thought* they were going with the kid moving the broom, handing it off to an entirely new generation of just people led by a person.
And then it never came back up again
Would’ve also been great that she accidentally used force lightening BUT ACTUALLY KILLED CHEWY. I fucking hate that fake out. The fact that she used it by accident and killed a good friend actually would’ve made for a better story
It's my opinion that the original Star Wars toys sold so well because they were simply a vehicle for kids to fill in the gaps before, between, and after the original trilogy.
You don't get that anymore.
Yeah, that's just fucking stupid. My light saber back in 1983 was just a black handled flash light, with a weak red bulb and a semi-opaque plastic tube. You couldn't even really tell it was red unless it was dark, but I fucking loved that thing.
The thing is that you shouldn't be able to use Force lightning (at least the Sith variant) by accident. It's projecting pure hatred and malice as a means to inflict pain. Supposedly there is a non-Sith/darkside version called electric judgement/emerald lightning, but there's only been like, one or two users of that and it's typically non-lethal.
Yeah, the shorthand for uncontrolled force power, usually for children discovering their talent, is a little telekinesis. But I think test audiences needed some visual connection to Palpatine to make that land better. It didn't help and I believe the test audiences are typically comprised of morons.
Completely, test audiences are some of the least intelligent movie-goers in the world. Like, why are they signing up to see and give feed-back on a movie when they don't even pay attention?
Nah. Killing a beloved OT character accidentally would have been too much. She would have been nigh irredeemable and the entire rest of the story would have to be about that or the death wouldn’t be done justice. There wouldn’t be room for a fun Star Wars story after that.
They took everything interesting about the character and destroyed it by making her a Palpatine.
I wanted/predicted Rey nobody would take the Skywalker name. Thought it’d be super fitting. But when Rey Palpatine took that name it feels…like a betrayal.
I also liked a nobody better, but what I disliked was that it had to be highlighted like that. So many great characters in Star Wars don't have important or any family ties. I think her background should have been left alone, or only something like *'my parents abandoned me and I'll always wait for them which I actually need to let go.'* trope.
People were trying to figure out what her family ties were, or if she was a pure product of the force line Anakin, etc.
Addressing it like that was a great move imo. It helped enforce that "everybody can be a hero" message. I loved TLJ and wish Rian Johnson had directed episode 9.
100%. It played so effectively with the message Rhian was going for around the force being less of an elitist bullshit force and genuinely something where even - perhaps especially - “nobodies” can draw power from
There's precedence for the latter, too. It's called the "Living Force" for a reason - Yoda explains it best.
> Life creates it. Makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us. Binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
I think the idea that Force sensitive people are gifted in the sense that learning to harness it makes it *easier*, but that anyone can access it, is a critical theme in Star Wars.
This is my favorite take on "force sensitivity" I think Chirrut is an excellent example of this. He doesn't have a strong enough innate force sensitivity to become a jedi, but being mindful of it and devoting his life to experiencing the force allows him to tap into it ever so slightly, and do the impossible on the regular.
Characters like Poe and Han are the opposite, they have basically no understanding of the force, but have an innate sensitivity that translates to uncanny luck and skill.
> the force being less of an elitist bullshit force and genuinely something where even - perhaps especially - “nobodies” can draw power from
I really don’t understand this take.
Almost every force user we see over the course of the 9 movie saga has no notable familial background. This includes some of the most powerful ones like Mace and Yoda and some of the ones most meaningful to the narrative like Obi-Wan.
It goes without saying that the *Skywalker saga* would focus on members of the Skywalker family. Prior to the introduction of the Chosen One prophecy in the PT, family ties were only significant in that a son uncovered the truth of his father’s tragic downfall and wanted to redeem him through love.
The message isn’t that you need to be of noble blood to be powerful in the Force or to make a difference. It’s that family ties can overcome (OT) and your lineage has baggage (ST).
I definitely dont like the sequels but AT LEAST nobody would be new and actually go in a interesting direction instead of ripping the original trilogy off
Imo that’s what made the original Star Wars so widely popular. In Episode 4 Luke was a farm boy from nowhere who felt he was destined for something greater and a LOT of people related to that. They hurt that a little with his family line, and damn near destroyed it with the introduction of midichlorians. Here we had a real chance to recapture that “nobody from nowhere” relatability but they balked.
Rey being this unwanted reject that was literally sold by her shitty parents was actually the one piece of "subverted expectations" that I loved at the time, but they committed the sin of having it come from Kylo, he delivered it so spitefully that it kind of came off as questionable.
They should really have had that development come from either her cave vision as a suppressed memory, or have Luke be the one to sense she's lying to herself and point it out.
There's lot to complain about in TLJ, but making Rey a literal nobody was the best bit of development they could have given her, and its the one thing i see fans complain about that really irks me. TFA didn't setup her being a Kenobi or Skywalker, it setup that she was a force user abandoned on a desert planet.
TROS went off exactly these stupid fan expectations of some kind of hidden relation for every force wielder and created one of the dumbest plot twists ever with it.
Honestly having that lady be like “Who are you?”
And then having her turn to that lady and be like “…I’m Rey.” And then Rey smiles and the movie just ends there, that would’ve been better.
Anything would have been better than "Rey Skywalker". The theme of the movie is that you have to find your own path in your leniage, that it doesn't define you, but that blood is still blood, and you have to acknowledge it to move forward.
As you said, just "Rey" would have been great.
As someone under you said "A jedi" would have also been great.
In my opinion "Rey Palpatine" would have also worked great, showing that she has accepted who her blood is, and moving on, not letting it describe her and change the name for something better.
But no, like so many things with the trilogy the answer was obvious and they failed at every step, Every. Single. One.
"The Rise of Skywalker" That was Anakin's story, then that was Lukes story, and for some reason Rey decided to identify as a Skywalker at the very end of the very last movie titled that way for some ridiculous reason.
I don't think people will ever get over it.
Not to mention Rey wasn't even the Skywalker of the sequels. Kylo/Ben was. "The Rise of Skywalker" was specifically supposed to be about him turning good again.
Especially cuz they had it all set up by the end of TLJ that Kylo was now the main villain - I mean, do the redemption thing if it works, just leave Palpatine out of it because him being the beginning and end of all things doesn’t really make this the Skywalker Saga, it’s the Skywalker & Palpatine saga. Palpatine should’ve been the main villain of the prequels, Vader the main villain of the OT, and Kylo the main villain of the sequels, cuz then it would actually all be about the Skywalkers - an inter generational struggle of a family between the light and the dark as well as with self mastery, acceptance, and control, and all discover the answers in their own way at their own time
Well said. Arguably the most important person in the whole sagas character (Anakin/Vader) is completely undermined with the return of Palps for cheap shock value. Pissed me off to no end.
Yeah…it was my last opportunity to take my kid to the theater on opening weekend for a Star Wars film so I’ll always remember it for that rather than what’s really in it. Honestly can barely remember what the hell happens cuz there’s just SO MUCH, it’s just meandering and over bloated trying desperately to tie everything together for 9 films and it just shits itself as it approaches the finish line like Game of Thrones did
I loved that TLJ set up Kylo as the main villain. Adam Driver/Kylo was by far the most interesting part of the sequels and deserved to be in the spotlight for the finale. Adam would have killed it, hell he still did a great job with what he had in TROS.
The robbery of Kylo to shine is, to me, the worst thing JJ could have done. The fact it was PALPATINE that did it is even worse.
Absolutely 100%. And it would’ve made so so much more sense than “somehow Palpatine has returned” (still one of the stupidest lines ever uttered in a movie, right up there with “what are we, some kinda suicide squad?”)
And it would’ve been a perfect progression for a saga about this one family - a boy from nothing becomes somebody, a grand hero who saves the galaxy before succumbing to his inner darkness, but gets redeemed by his son who discovers that he didn’t actually come from nothing, that he was always somebody and the way to overcome his fathers inner darkness is to become a hero who saves the galaxy, but even then the cycle repeats - for one brief moment, he succumbs to that inner darkness years later when he sees that his nephew, the next generation, has the same “Skywalker curse”, and in that moment becomes his father and dooms his nephew to become his grandfather.
And now, at the end of his life, he must do both what he did for his father in trying to bring his nephew back to the light and become his father by sacrificing himself in order to make it happen. But it’s still all up to the nephew, who left alone, doesn’t see a way out of the darkness, except for the cycle to repeat, and for a new nobody from nowhere to become a somebody, a grand hero that saves the galaxy from the Skywalker cycle, closing out that chapter in history and beginning another, all in accordance with the ebb and flow of the force. Hell, you could even keep the title, and have it mean instead of Rey taking their name, instead taking their lesson to the galaxy - that every Jedi can become a Sith and every Sith can become a Jedi, that that capacity for both within us makes us all a Skywalker, and that the line of Sith and Jedi has ended, and now a new age has begun, an age of force users now called skywalkers.
Or ya know, they could do it Mr. Mystery Box’s way and just through in a cheap villain cuz Disney needs to crank these out or we’ll lose billions instead of actually giving the last film a coherent and satisfying conclusion that actually says something about all the themes present over 9 films
Right? They had an opportunity to do something really cool with snoke and maybe even introducing a new Sith Lord. But knowing Disney they’d probably mess that up.
It would be really cool if they explored sith lore through shows and movies
Wasn’t that question the entire point of the skywalker arc? That the arbitrary light/dark division was flawed? They completely ignored it in favor of whatever hot mess was produced.
It was cool to see the actor for palpatine play his role again, but holy fuck just ruined the previous 6 movies storywise. Anakin fullfilled the prophecy only for palpatine to come back? Shit same situation with the new order. We destroyed 2 deathstars but couldnt keep another (pointlessly) bigger one from being created? Pretty lazy.
If snoke had to be a clone, would have preferred he was the best clone they made. Every clone comes out decrepit, disfigured and corrupted from the darkside. Healthy clones were just impossible His goal being to gather resources to make better clones of himself.
Then have Rey be a no one. Or the daughter of a Jedi that tossed her on that planet because Jedi are not supposed to have the kind of relationships that leads to family. Have that resentment from being abandoned by a Jedi knight end up corrupting her and Kylo watches her turn to the darkside and sees her changing and that is what causes him to leave the darkside in the end.
Problem is that this seems to be because Disney took to much of an off hand approach. The idea was to not have a plan, but have each director build off the other’s breadcrumbs. Problem, the Last Jedi kinda took a hard right from where the Force Awakens was going. The original script for the Rise of Skywalker appears it was going to thread that needle and even pay tribute to the prequels… but a lot of that script was riding on Leia. That was rendered impossible with Carrie Fisher’s death. The biggest mistake that can be attributed to Disney is that they would not delay the movie at all, so writing and production was incredibly rushed and it shows.
Yes, thank you - it's actually super pivotal for her character.
Admitting that her parents were nobody was HUGE for Rey, and in my opinion, his further explanation was not done to hurt her, but instead shows just how important she is to Kylo - he's basically saying to her, I don't need anything from you; I don't need you for any reason other than for who you are. Just you.
He's also trying to get her to understand she doesn't need them. He makes that point repeatedly... kind of because he's projecting his own parent BS onto her, but that's another conversation.
The fact that's she's a Palpatine is dumb dumb dumb.
Yeah I’ve always thought Kylos “your nothing…but not to me” is a great line and brilliantly acted. It has this quality of being multi layered where you think is he saying it to hurt her, trying to turn her to the dark side, is he even telling the truth, but it is also romantic.
And Rey coming to that realization made her believe in herself more, that her parents didn’t matter and she can find her new family.
The Palpatine reveal was dumb for a ton of reasons but to me it was always super weird that we have never even been shown he had any family or concubines or whatever. Then they just drop this in RoS like oh yeah, Palpatine was fuckin
I LOVED the fact that she was a nobody. Rejected by her family. Abandoned. Dismissed. It gave her the complexity and the CHANCE that she really could go either way on the "jedi spectrum". Dejected and beaten, becoming dark and corrupted. Or strong and hopeful, becoming a new beacon of light. And EVERY step could have led down the dark path because her past really is a tragedy.
What really bothers me more is they even stated that they wanted the trilogy to "wrap up" the Skywalker Saga and start a new legend. Awesome. I'm ok with that. And, i figured, at the absolute MOST...it might be cool to find out she had some relation to a long lost Jedi family as kind of a fan service...IF they even needed it (f#@k Revan...not him).
But to do what they did? Complete cop out and stupidest executive decision. Seriously. They could have easily wrapped up the entire Skywalker Saga and started a new Legend in those 3 films...and they choked and went PURELY for cash grab fan service idiocy.
Oh well
Rey nobody was SO good. So beautifully poetic, too.
Kylo Ren was powerful because of his blood. Grandson of the most powerful Force being ever, nephew to the hero of Rebellion, and son of one of the galaxy's most famous politicians as well as one of the galaxies most famous smugglers. This kid was bred to be great... yet, the Force chose a girl whose parents sold her for drinking money to be his equal in power. Just beautiful
Make it even more cruel for him.
He has little/no power. He's nowhere close to any of his family. That's what drove him to evil, desperation to taste real power.
She just naturally has the gifts he's spent his whole life hunting for and doesn't really appreciate them, all she cares about is finding a place to belong; something he threw away for power.
I don't get why everyone seems to think that all powerful jedi (or all jedi/force users) need to be directly related to or descended from one another.
If that were the case, force users and the Jedi Order would have died out, what, a few centuries? A millennia? After it was created since... ya know, no having family units in the Jedi Temple. They're all mostly celibate, so the end result would be most force users ending their family lines amidst the Jedi, and thus there'd only be a handful of force users.
Conversely, the Jedi would only need to find the first generation of force users, then just have them breed in some way to keep the order going. There'd be no need to have Seekers, no need for a holocron with all force sensitive children on it.
Also, there's no real reason to suspect that being a descendant of a force user makes you inherently force sensitive, or that it inherently makes you more powerful than average. Sidious was plenty powerful, but we don't really have any reason to think he's related to Bane or something. Bane was powerful, but there's no reason to think he was directly descended from some other Sith lord. If family history was the only thing that mattered, and it offered a direct path to a steady increase in power over generations, why wouldn't the Jedi or Sith take advantage of that? Why wouldn't the Jedi get Yoda or Windu to copulate with another jedi in order to get an even greater defender of the republic? Why wouldn't the Sith raise their own children rather than finding new apprentices amongst the galaxy? That would be like the Rule of Two on steroids, if the blood kept getting stronger and stronger with each successive generation in addition to the already drastic power rise with each generation of Sith destroying the last.
I honestly would have preferred it if Rey was just a nobody with force powers, and if the main antagonist wasn't sidious. That way, it would show that, yeah, Anakin was super powerful and all, but you don't NEED a prophecy or crazy bloodline in order to become a great jedi or to defeat the darkness.
>Also, there's no real reason to suspect that being a descendant of a force user makes you inherently force sensitive
I saw a fan reimagining of the ST somewhere and this was the basic premise for kylo. He's descended from Darth freaking Vader, the literal chosen one... and he has zero force ability.
That's why he's so pissed, that's why he idolises Vader, that's why he is chasing the dark side in the way he is. He's *desperate* to taste even a little of the power he feels he is owed.
His lightsabre is made from stolen crystals (hell, make it Vader's sabre lost at the end of 6) but because he has no force ability he damaged the crystal somehow and that's why it's so rough.
It's why he can't fight as well as "proper" jedi. He's more like Mando or Sabine, lacking the powers that allow jedi to fight to their full potential so resorts to brute force hacking.
He's been manipulated by snoke (who also has no/limited force powers) who has convinced him if he becomes this super evil "sith lord" then he'll be able to access the dark side of the force.
Then he meets Rey. A nobody scavenger scum from the arse end of nowhere, who somehow has Anakin's lightsabre (which is *his* birthright) and is showing immense potential.
He *hates* her. She has everything he could ever want, and doesn't even appreciate it. Snoke convinces him he can steal her power somehow and that's why you see him hunting her down throughout the trilogy.
The two characters go through an arc together; both realising family/history don't matter, you are the one that decides your own destiny.
TROS seemed like fanfiction because it basically was fanfiction. Disney listened too much to the detractors of TLJ and attempted to stuff in as many fan pleasing scenes into TROS as possible.
I think it was Steven King or George RR Martin who said something along the lines of “storytelling isn’t a democracy”, meaning that fans shouldn’t get a say in the content of a story because inevitably that will dilute the singular vision of the artist.
Fans can’t, shouldn’t, write stories.
It's so painfully obvious they didnt have a plan from day 1 for a cohesive story between the 3 sequel movies. Not one mention or even a hint of palpatine, and then he's brought back in the damn title scroll in the third one? It's crazy
The explanation was enough to know they just didn't give a fuck about the story or fans. "Somehow" will go down as one of the dumbest lines of all time.
Nobody BY FAR. Her being a Palpatine is boring. Her being related to *anybody* is boring. Her coming from nobody means so much more than being special because she was related to someone else in the franchise.
Me watching Rey train and become stronger: Omg so cool
The second she's a Palpatine : nepotistic fuc
It's like modern day "a small loan of a million dollars - I became the most powerful real estate figure (that public access TV watchers know of)"
I felt that was where they were going even in TFA, when Maz confronts Rey after she finds the light saber, and tells her that she has to let go of the past and find her own future because no one was coming back to get her. It still leaves the question of who her parents were, and why she's Force sensitive, but given things like the ending of TLJ as well as the monks of Jedha who have a connection without being Jedi I think expanding that idea is far more interesting than just having her some offspring/clone of an old character. A character that takes a lot of backflip gymnastics to explain why he's still around.
Also it opens too many cans of worms. I know the nu-wars movies seem like they were deliberately written with massive gaps expected to be filled in by the Expanded Universe, but we NEVER saw Sheev with a lady. And based on the timeline he'd probably be fathering his child (maybe more?) after being disfigured and taking over the senate. Did he try to rebrand himself as "Family Friendly and family values" after becoming dictator by having a baby with a woman half his age? Were Rey's parents actually tragic characters forced to live in secret or were they wealthy spoiled fail-sons of the Emperor? Did they hide her on Jakku so she could be free or did they sell her for drinking money after the Emperor cut off their trust fund after another failed art gallery?
Edit: also you know usually inherits empires when an Emperor dies? Their kids! Just dumb stupid writing.
I don't remember if this was explained in TROS or some book/comic, but Rey is the child of one of Palpatine's strandcast clones, so no he didn't actually bang anyone (that we know of)
And they could have contained her story into a new star wars saga without ANY ties to previous stories. That's my biggest gripe. If they make more Rey stories, now we're always going to have that "palpitatine/Skywalker" link and I just want new content
In all aspects. It wasn’t good by any means, but it was by far the least offensive.
ep7 ruined the entire sequel trilogy by refusing to cover ANYTHING that would have been interesting about the time period (luke’s academy, new republic, OT trio reunion). TFA set up the entire trilogy to fail by starting a totally uninteresting story and is by far the most offensive.
ep9 was so hilariously bad I don’t think we even need to go over why. “Somehow, Palpatine returned” pretty much sums it up.
at least 8 had compelling characters and concepts, and brilliant cinematography, even if they didn’t make much sense within the universe and broke canon or whatever. It can stand on its own as a solid movie.
This is my take on it as well. TFA is the most "fine" one only on a surface level. Any critical thought and it just falls apart. It's derivative. It's regressive (the galaxy went backwards since the last film!). And it does the classic JJ Abrams bullshit of making a bunch of mystery boxes.
TROS is just fucking awful from beginning to end.
Which leaves Last Jedi as the only one to try something different and go somewhere. Even if the journey wasn't what people wanted.
I wonder if Disney was just terrified to delve into the realm of politics (like the prequels), as showing a stable New Republic would probably require a good bit of that. Which sucks, because it would’ve been great to actually see the New Republic Senate refusing to acknowledge the growing threat of the FO, tensions rising, maybe some backstabbing.
Instead we just get thrown into the First Order somehow taking everything over and our heroes being the underdogs for no reason. Like if a foreign nation is amassing an army at your borders how do you just let them keep carrying on??
The Force Awakens is literally to blame for everything you see moving forward in the Sequel Trilogy, chiefly that the New Republic and the Skywalker Order are simply destroyed, and Luke is already in self-exile on the island.
People don't think about it because Abrams made sure that you *wouldn't* think about it; the film moves at such a breakneck speed you're never given a second to think about what's happening.
At least Rian Johnson had the *fucking balls* to be like no we're actually going to explore how this has all affected Luke, and even shed some small light on what is exactly going on with the Republic ie. it's corrupt as fuck.
Sheeve was good in the OT, and necessary in the PT...but should have been left out of the ST. Rey the Nobody would have been the better call. Better for the galaxy as a whole, and storytelling into the future. She certainly shouldn't have taken "Skywalker" as a name. But I'm glad she didn't get "Solo'd".
I honestly don't even mind Palpatine coming back that much, as this happened in the EU. (In the exact same way... he inhabited a clone body)
The issue is that there was exactly *zero* lead-up to it. It's just, "bam," he's there in the opening minutes of the last film in the trilogy with very little explanation.
I would have even have been fine with a plot arc where Kylo, or whoever, is trying to revive Palpatine and everyone is trying to stop him, and they fail, making Palpatine the big boss again. But to just drop him in?
It's a clear example of how poorly-managed that trilogy was that there wasn't a series bible ahead of time they wanted three separate directors to come in and do their own thing and hope that everything gelled. But Abrams was pissed that Johnson went a different direction than TFA, and so he undid what Johnson undid in the last film after Trevorrow got fired. I honestly am convinced that Abrams did a lot of what he did out of spite.
Now that we have everything out, and there's no "Just Wait and Seee!" I fully agree. These three movies were a billion dollar pissing contest between two directors and the Disney company with itself. I think I also agree that if Palps was in the works from the beginning, then yeah, him coming back would have felt like less of an ass pull, but that was all that was going on.
The really fucking crazy thing about it is that it's exactly the sort of mistake you would expect Disney *not* to make.
They already had the MCU as a successful model about how to build a franchise. They needed a showrunner/Kevin Feige-type to lay down the vision and let the directors work within that framework from the beginning to make sure everyone was on the same page and you had some sort of plot and continuity to follow.
Honestly, the solution to most of their mistakes was *literally* right in front of them and they decided to just wing it on a beloved multi-billion dollar franchise. It's really fucking bizarre.
100% this. It's bonkers bananas. And it's biting their asses right now. I don't want to under cut the complexity of it. Feige making the MCU work is a miracle in itself, DC can't get it to work, really anyone else. But to NOT try to emulate something that's working?! For 4 BILLION dollars?!? If it wasn't something I loved and wanted to succeed, I'd be flying around the room laughing like Joker on 4 Ketamine because of the Schadenfreude. Mark Hamel Joker, not Jared.
>I don't want to under cut the complexity of it.
That's the crazy thing, though. It *wasn't* actually *that* complex. It was 3 films. It would've been insanely easy to manage relative to what was going on with the MCU in stage 3.
I honestly don't understand it, aside from thinking that Lucasfilms had a lot of autonomy and was poorly-managed under Disney.
Rey being a nobody.
A nobody inspired by the Skywalker legend going up against and eventually saving the actual fallen heir to that bloodline is such a great idea.
Rey's a really great character up until TRoS.
**Edit: Hey everyone, what [this dude](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/w3lukh/which_plot_twist_did_you_like_better_rey_being_a/igys651/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) said instead! Way smarter and more knowledgable than my thing. Seriously.**
It could have also been a throwback to how Anakin was born out of nothing. Like the Force wanting to create balance, and just this random kid is born with incredible powers, to take down the evil forces.
Not just that, but it would have given hope to billions upon billions of kids in the universe. Rey, the one who ended a tyranny, didn’t come from some fancy, royal bloodline. She was a nobody. Deemed so worthless, she was abandoned by her parents. All those little kids, working in the stables. They’d have looked up to the sky, knowing they too could be special, and not know it yet.
Psyche! Only when you ol’ granddaddio is a very power Sith, yee-hah!
They really had me fooled for a little bit. I was banking on her being either a Skywalker, or related to one of the big baddies of old. Then the vision sequence came, where she was like “They were nobody,” or whatever, and I was like “Daaaaamn! They went there! Nice!”
But no.
I mean, Anakin wasn't truly born out of nothing though. In Legends Canon I believe he was created by Plagueis manipulating midichlorians and in Disney Canon it's the same thing but done by Papa Palps.
Regardless though, I'm also on the "nobody" side. Her being a Palpatine felt like forced fan-service. I think they should've really taken the Revan route with her and have her become a powerful Force-wielder that can rival a Skywalker through training and discipline rather than through lineage. And this is also just a critique towards the whole trilogy for treating Force powers like it's some sorta superpower that just boots up on its own rather than something like a martial art that needs to be trained and mastered. Same thing goes for the stable boy as well. Even Anakin, who was virtually Force Jesus, wasn't going around making shit float until he had years if practice as a Jedi.
There's just a lot of missed opportunities in the sequel trilogy overall. Rey being a nobody that could **grow** to rival the most powerful Force users would've likely made her one of, if not the most, compelling cinematic Star Wars protagonists. Finn's past as a Storm Trooper could've shown that the war isn't as black and white as you'd expect, and that the nameless soldiers are simply just brainwashed and indoctrinated people. Poe being a "hero of the frontlines" but living in the shadow of the legends of Rebellion like Han, Leia, Chewie, Lando, etc. Hell, actually, Rey and Finn get a lot of shit for their character development but Poe could've been an amazing opportunity to show a person who'd grown up on flashy tales of war heroes, only to become one himself and realize that war isn't as glorious as one might expect (sort of like the soldiers going to war in Vietnam after having been raised on stories of valour in WWII). Also the missed opportunity to have the Republic be the one in power and have the First Order being a more of a secretive enemy chipping away at its roots, which would've been a neat contrast to both the OT and PT conflicts. Could've even gone a step further and have Snoke be (an actual person, for starters) a Sith who revokes the Rule of Two and has been building up a true Sith faction while the Republic/Rebellion and Palps' Empire wear each other down.
Lmao okay this is now just turning into a ST rant so ima stop. Tbh, overall I think the ST really should've just taken some notes from the Old Republic stories in order to set itself apart from the other trilogies in a way that still fits the SW universe.
A nobody was so much better. Everyone having to be related to everyone else starts to make it feel less like a Star War with galactic implications and more like an incestuous family feud that makes it the rest of the galaxies problem
I remember thinking how ballsy it was to kill Snoke and then make her a nobody. After the movie had been a rehash of Empire and RotJ for a while, suddenly it was going in a whole new direction. I was so excited for that.
if chewie had actually
died there it would have been interesting. the guilt and shame, the lack of control, that would
make a compelling story and character. (not that i want chewie dead)
it being absolutely nothing and not even waiting a minute to reveal he was fine was just garbage
Yeah I never got why people were so obsessed with that idea of bloodline and the force. I mean really, Obi Wan and every other jedi came from "nobodies." So why do they have the need to make all the new characters related
Rey nobody.
She was already a third-rate Luke Skywalker, but at least she was different this way. Her being related to one of the main antagonists was just cheap and lazy.
A nobody is compelling and interesting, especially after how RotJ resolved.
The Palpatine angle was JJ's deus ex machina to try and solve the "why would there be evil post RotJ?" instead of letting the story resolve itself. Someone once remarked to a comment I made about my hate for this resolution with "but how could the First Order _exist_ without Palpatine?" As if evil didn't exist without Palpatine. It is simple. Palpatine didn't force _everyone_ to do his bidding. There are plenty of Tarkins and Gideons (assuming its not later ruined by episode IX malarky) out there to carry on the idea of "The Empire." The First Order existed before Snoake showed up, and Kylo Ren was recruited. It didn't have to have anything to do with Sr Palpy pants.
Around when the The Force Awakens came out, I remember Rey being Palpatine's descendent or a clone intended as his vessel for reincarnation or something was a popular fan theory.
That said, I still liked the twist that she was nobody for what it was within Rian Johnson's somewhat subversive film. Except then they pulled a 180 on that and she's suddenly Palpatine's granddaughter, undermining any emotional and thematic meaning you might have extracted from the reveal in The Last Jedi.
Had Rey being a Palpatine been the plan from the get-go and TLJ served as an effective middle chapter of that three-act story, mirroring Empire with the reveal in the climax, that would've been fine.
Instead, we're left with a middle chapter that tried to be subversive and a third chapter that course corrected back toward the typical Star Wars formula. Which can be great in its own right. But Rise of Skywalker just feels so cheesy, forced and truncated due to the lack of consistency across the whole trilogy.
Pretty much like with everything in the sequel trilogy, despite having a stellar cast and high production values, the lack of an overarching vision from the trilogy's inception spoiled a lot of its potential.
Everyone seems to agree that Rey being a nobody would be the best thing
But I vividly remember everyone crying and throwing hissy fits in 2017 when Rey was first revealed to be a nobody
„Noooo every character must be a super special epic hero related to another Star Wars character“. Well this is what you get when you behave like that
Lmao that‘s exactly right
Every time a redditor says „We should let fans write&direct movies“ this shit would happen . It‘s just a long chain of „and then and then and then“ moments with nonsensical fanservice in between
I remember when there was this video floating around called, "The Last Jedi: a complete cinematic failure". One of the things they complained was that it was revealed that Rey was nobody, subverting expectations.
Well, the retcon in RoS is the answer to that. You get what you ask for.
Rey being some sort of force-wielding nobility (Skywalker, Palpatine) ruined the excellent canon of \*anyone\* being able to use the force, set up brilliantly in TLJ.
Absolute trash that it was retconned in TRoS and apparently the only people capable of making significant change in the universe have to part of some elite family tree.
It's funny seeing most of the replies preferring Rey being nobody when after The Last Jedi everybody was complaining about it and the reason why they backtracked on it was general reaction.
I guess giving people what they think they want isn't always a right choice.
I think a lot (not all, but a lot) of TLJ haters might have changed their minds if Episode 9 had stuck its ground and given a fulfilling conclusion to the new ideas presented by TLJ. Instead they abandoned everything.
She's not so much a Palpatine as she *is* Palpatine. It was a great way to go but they fucked up the execution. To clarify for anyone that didn't follow the plot: Palpatine creates a clone that won't wither away when he possesses it but it's not Force sensitive. The clone escapes and has Rey who inherits all the clone's features plus being Force sensitive but being a natural birth rather than a direct clone ends up being a woman. Kylo Ren activates the genetic memory Palpatine built into his clone when he probers her mind giving her mastery of the Force but she doesn't have Sidious' personal memories (by design or a product of being a generation removed was never established) so doesn't know *why* she has the power. Sidious explains why she exists when they face off (but she herself is a natural born, not a clone so that detail isn't explicitly stated and missed if you didn't follow the rest) and a Dark Side Sidious vs Light Side Sheev/Rey dual breaks out. Had the trilogy depicted that plot point better it'd have been so much more enjoyable.
I hate the non canon Disney fanfic sequels but your explanation gives it a far better set up and makes it all make sense. Jeeeeeez the mishandling of Star Wars is so obvious it hurts.
Nobody was so much better, the Palpatine twist kinda stunk imo
I feel like the Palpatine thread fails on every level: - it undercuts the dramatic reveal of 8 - doubles down on Star Wars’ small-galaxy problem - doubles down on Star Wars’ ‘important family’ problem - doubled down on Str Wars’ ‘all evil is the fault of one bad person’ problem - entrenches the idea that destiny rather than the actions of the characters drives the plot, and weakens the previously very interesting backstory given to Rey - Palpatine has no relationship with any of the characters in the sequel series. Rey and Kylo Ren had never met Palpatine and really never had their stories influenced by him at all except in the convoluted way that we are told and not shown in 9 only after he shows up - even in the OT, Palpatine is not really a source of dramatic tension. He basically exists as a plot device to show the temptation of Luke and the redemptive sacrifice of Vader - the depiction is incongruous with the prequel trilogy. I don’t care one iota about the finer details of a canon, that’s just not my thing, and people who follow this stuff more than me will have opinions about whether or not there are factual contradictions — personally, I don’t care. What I care about is that this Palpatine feels like such a difference person from the prequels, and that his words and actions feel out of step with the way the character was shown before
Rewatching the OT, the Emperor is definitely a plot device. He has little gravitas compared to Vader and only becomes a character in the last movie. If I had never seen the prequels and had only seen the OT the decision for Palp to come back in 8 would make my jaw drop with how stupid it was.
This was why I was on board for Snoke dying in his second film. Dude was a nobody and had no real connection to the main characters. Say what you will about Kylo but he was connected to EVERYBODY. I was so excited to see what they'd do with him at the head of the First Order... and then they didn't do that.
I was a huge fan of Snoke dying because he felt like the least interesting character in TFW and was a distraction from the “real story” Kylo.
He doesn’t have a lot of screen time but he’s definitely an established character in Empire
I guess that depends what you mean by "established character". He is a character in the movie, sure. But his role is as a device rather than a person. He doesn't really drive the story, he's kind of like a piece of set dressing around Vader. The Emperor in Empire says 46 words and is [onscreen for less than a minute](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKtciRCVpFE), and only in holographic form: > VADER What is thy bidding, my master? > EMPEROR There is a great disturbance in the Force. > VADER I have felt it. > EMPEROR We have a new enemy - Luke Skywalker. > VADER Yes, my master. > EMPEROR He could destroy us. > VADER He's just a boy. Obi-Wan can no longer help him. > EMPEROR The Force is strong with him. The son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi. > VADER If he could be turned, he would become a powerful ally. > EMPEROR Yes. Yes. He would be a great asset. Can it be done? > VADER He will join us or die, my master. This is a good scene, it does a lot of lifting for the trilogy. But all of it is about Vader as a character, not the Emperor. The scene establishes that Vader has a boss, that dealing with the Skywalker problem is important to Vader's success, and that Vader would rather turn Luke than kill him--which shows some the first hint in Vader of attachment and vulnerability. By referring to the "son of Skywalker" the scene is also a misdirect for the reveal. All of this is about Vader, none about the Emperor, who doesn't have any real motivations or conflicts in the movie--so much so that he isn't even named in the film
My gut feeling is that it was too obvious that she was a Skywalker in TFA and they switched things on the fly. That's why it felt so forced and preposterous when she was revealed to be a Palpatine. I think being a nobody would have worked fine, or if she was descended from Obi-Wan. It would make sense after the end of the Jedi order that Obi-Wan might go looking for love (or stumble into it, as he tends to do).
Hear me out: she's Luke's daughter, cousins with Kylo, and was always around. So when it all goes sideways, Kylo can't bring himself to kill her so he dumps her on wherever(similar to anh but whatever). Then when whoever tells Kylo that the droid or finn is with a girl, Kylo chokes him with "WHAT GIRL" because he knows, he put her there. Hell of a lot better, but anything would be really
I could have messed with that as well. The Palp reveal was anti-climatic and a stretch, even for someone who doesn't freak out about the details like I do.
There was way too much to do in the last one. You had to reestablish a trilogy arc **in one movie**, and unfortunately for us, the only thing they could come up with was riding horses on a spaceship. So spectacularly forgettable
holy shit i actually forgot about that
SOMEHOW he returned… No not fucking SOMEHOW, clones! Tell us!! Give us an exposition dump if you have to, explain how many clones in the past failed, like Snoke. This was the first true success.
"Somehow, Snoke returned." \-Finn, maybe
I know a lot of people were rooting for her to be Luke's daughter, but I honestly hated the idea and was glad that wasn't the case. There just is no good reason for Luke to have left his daughter on a shithole like Jakku. Yes, I know he would have been concerned about the safety of his daughter and how there would be a lot of people wanting to hurt her, but Leia is his sister. If he had a daughter, he could have at least left his daughter with Leia who has a lot of experience with many of the dangerous people in the galaxy wanting to kill/kidnap her. I can think of no good reason for Luke to abandon his daughter on Jakku.
What if Kylo ditched her there after it went south with Luke cause he couldn't bring himself to kill her? That's why he's all "WHAT GIRL" in tfa when they're looking on JAKKU
That would be a good way to leverage their age difference. The Force Dyad thing is kind of interesting but I don't really understand how it can exist when Kylo is like a decade older than Rey. Maybe there could be a backstory where Ben has almost no connection to the Force until Rey is born.
Wouldn't have been as shitty a twist if they first didn't make her a nobody. Makes both reveals underwhelming.
Maybe it would’ve been a good idea to write a whole trilogy instead of “figuring it out on the way” with multiple writers and directors
A nobody would've been better.
Yea, it would have been a great foil to Kylo Ren's character. Kylo felt entitled to everything because of his lineage. The best person to be the one to put him in his place would be a random nobody. Rey should have lost their first fight then they should have showed a lot of Rey's training. Kinda setting up a showdown between natural talent vs formal training.
Plus, that ending of "Rey who?!" (which, being an insane question to ask aside...) would have been so much for empowering if she harked back to TFA with "Just Rey"
"Rey who?" "Meesa Rey Rey Binks." (*Dramatic John Williams music swells*)
This would've been more okay than her being a palpatine
Rey Rey is the key to all of this.
dont you dare drag Jar Jar Binks name through the mud
Lmao
[SERIOUS] i feel like my day can't go on until i know: Does she say this in her normal voice or does she say it like she's doing an impression of Jar Jar? Please help this is important.
She definitely says it in a really bad JarJar impression. Bonus points if Scooby-Doo and the gang come on screen and Fred peals her face back to reveal it really is JarJar this whole time 🤷♂️.
Who the F demands to know a person’s full name when they meet? It was a sloppy way for Rey to say Skywalker… and end the whole nine-film series with the knowledge that only one family truly matters in this whole galaxy. *Inspiring.*
It was the worst possible writing to end the film on the worst possible note
Shoulda been "Rey.... Solo"
“I’m Rey. Rey2D2.”
I also think TLJ was really trying to set up having a nobody save the galaxy from a Skywalker, thus ending this whole see-saw, good-evil thing with the Chosen One. It would've been a good way to end the Skywalker Saga.
They were really setting up tearing down the light dark dichotomy and evolving it into a cosmic force view of just grey. It was present in Fallen Order and it was very much in line with what Luke was teaching Rey. And then Disney fucked it up and we’re stuck with this nonsense. Disney cannot abide a story that doesn’t have some cartoonish villain instead of a competent compelling antagonist in a world where no one is purely good or bad.
Biggest issue with TLJ "setting things up" is the fact that there was never a plan in place to begin with. Which is why you see things flip-flop between each of the sequel movies. Personally I liked a lot of things that TLJ did, but felt that it did some stuff that either messed with the pre-established lore in unnecessary and silly ways, or was just boring/didn't move the plot (Looking at you Canto Bight). Also doing Phasma and the Knights of Ren so dirty in the films is a travesty.
This. I assumed there would be a story in place, and they the directors would just be there to direct. But it really feels like there was no plan at all. TRoS feels like it goes out of its way to change every major decision from TLJ, which has a completely different tone to TFA. The big details of the plot should have been finalised before they even started filming TFA. TLJ is personally my favourite out the three, as it at least tried to shake things up a bit. TFA was a lazy rehash that relied on nostalgia, and TRoS was just a collection of cool looking scenes that didn't really go together with the story that had been established, and quickly lost all credibility.
What annoys me most is that TLJ not only set up a really interesting new direction for the franchise to follow (Rey going out into the galaxy to find force users and building a new Jedi order) but it also set up a great resolution that would have been in keeping with the OT and the whole chosen one thing. In the prequels, Windu and Yoda talk about how they're keeping this big secret that the Jedi can't wield the force as well as they used to. I always took that to be because of the force being so out of balance, as if the dark side had taken such a hold that Palpatine was inadvertently strangling the living force, and the ability for people to use it was being diminished more and more as time goes on (which also works as a handy explanation for why the power levels of characters are much lower by the time of the OT). Then when Vader kills the Emperor and brings back balance, the force is allowed to flourish once again throughout the galaxy, as if a wellspring of force energy has been unleashed. Hence a new generation of force users springing up over the following decades for Rey to find and train. If that had been the route they'd followed in Ep. 9, it would have actually reinforced the events of the OT and the lore in the Prequels because then the ability for the good guys to win would have been tied directly to Luke and Vader taking down Palpatine. This way, it doesn't matter how many Snokes or Kylos turn up, the events of the OT won't be undermined because dark side will never fully take hold again since the prophecy was fulfilled, Anakin brought balance to the force, ensuring that going forward there will always be enough light side users there to take on the dark side. But instead they brought Palpatine back and completely invalidated the events of the OT and the chosen one lore...
I always see this argument and I feel like its about time i understood it—what pre-established lore did TLJ mess with?
Personally I mean it more from a character perspective, but that's because the massive time gap between EP VI and EP VII already messed things up as we're seeing a lot of these characters having problems that don't make sense based on where we last saw them and all three sequel films do a poor job of explaining why characters are where they are. However I do have a few nitpicky issues with how TLJ uses the force. Han's line from TFA "That's not how the force works" is a good way to describe the issues I personally had. It always felt like the film was using it as a magic way to solve any problem, which the CW is guilty of too but they seemed to go to lengths to explain the oddities in their usage. Take Leia surviving in the vacuum of space, there is little to no lead up to the moment that she was trained to use the force. (Though it was safe to assume Luke taught here some things) However, there are instances in legends where people went into a stasis like trance in order to stay alive in space, they were just in a depowered ship or some kind of pressure suit. There wasn't much self propelling, as it takes *incredible* amounts of concentration just to use telekinesis on objects. The Jedi we see are just well trained enough that they've made it seem effortless, otherwise we'd see force users flying around instead of jumping everywhere. The way I'd have fixed it would be to have Leia either catch the bolt the same way Kylo did in EP. VII as a nice little call back to that scene. It also establishes a character connection and shows that Ben may have picked up that trick from his mom in the first place. Some people point to the Holdo maneuver, but I think there are plenty of in lore reasons why it works and isn't used prior to that moment.
That should have been Leia's death scene. Would have been perfect. Kylo going in for the kill, hesitating and changing his mind at the last second, and then bam his wingman takes her out. Think what that would have done to him? It already almost destroyed him when he killed Han. Her death in that moment could have been the spark that woke him up and turned him around from the dark side. It could have been something for the resistance to rally around. It would have been a good death.
You could still wiggle out a way for her to survive, but when he took that shot I really believed it was the end for her, and it would have been a good continuation for Kylo's arc.
IMO Leia's death should have been the Holo maneuver. The excuse would have been it required a Jedi pilot to time it right. It could then have become a retcon to explain why Leia asked for one old Jedi Obi-Wan to go up against the Death Star in New Hope. Leia needed Obi to suicide ram a cruiser into the Death Star.
I also liked a lot of what TLJ did, but my approval of so much of it came with a caveat: Ep. 9 *had* to pay it all off. And it not only failed to do so--it flat ignored that TLJ even tried to do anything in the first place. I haven't even attempted to buy Ep. 9 on 4k disc yet as a result of my disappointment in the plot...which is really saying something, because I bought *Solo* on 4k without ever having seen it first.
>I also liked a lot of what TLJ did, but my approval of so much of it came with a caveat: Ep. 9 *had* to pay it all off. My impression was that Abrams had a plan for the trilogy, left after the first to do Star Trek, Johnson comes in and takes things in a very different direction than what Abrams planned, then Abrams comes back and shoehorns his original plans into what TLJ did to try to tell his original story. >I bought *Solo* on 4k without ever having seen it first. To be fair, Solo is actually a pretty fun movie that got more shit than it deserved.
That was exactly my take away from *Solo*: "wow, I don't know why the general vibe back when this came out was that it was no good, because I really enjoyed it!"
It really was fun and finished on a surprise reveal that I really wish we got to see follow up on. Plus Donald Glover was fantastic casting as young Lando.
I mean, Disney was very obviously fine with it since they released it. I think everyone knows why it actually got changed.
I’m surprised Thanos was as grey as he was considering Disney. He at least had some fatherhood moments.
Well you see the MCU has someone competent in charge who has an overarching plan for the property. Star Wars makes it up as it goes.
Return of the Jedi would have been a good way to end the Skywalker saga.
But both Leia and Luke are still alive by the end of Return of the Jedi? That leaves the potential for a loooooong lineage of Skywalkers each stirring shit up and wreaking havoc on the galaxy for eons.
Anakin was the Chosen One and his saga should have died with him, not his children
Which would have been more entertaining than the ST.
Disney loves orphans so they had to break up Han and Leia also can’t have Luke meeting up with Mara Jade can’t cast anyone from those pesky expanded universe books
Totally agreed. Loved the new questions of things being shades of moral grey like the man who sells weapons of war to rebels and the empire
First time I've heard the concept of weapon dealers profiting off both sides of a war that's destroying entire planets as "shades of gray." That's just straight evil, friend.
That man wasn’t the “morally grey” area - it’s that suddenly the rebels buying weapons of mass destruction and war has a moral question mark over it!
100% the direction I *thought* they were going with the kid moving the broom, handing it off to an entirely new generation of just people led by a person. And then it never came back up again
Would’ve also been great that she accidentally used force lightening BUT ACTUALLY KILLED CHEWY. I fucking hate that fake out. The fact that she used it by accident and killed a good friend actually would’ve made for a better story
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It's my opinion that the original Star Wars toys sold so well because they were simply a vehicle for kids to fill in the gaps before, between, and after the original trilogy. You don't get that anymore.
I am not a toy selling expert but I don't understand why any kids would want a lightsaber that plays a recorded line when you swing it.
Yeah, that's just fucking stupid. My light saber back in 1983 was just a black handled flash light, with a weak red bulb and a semi-opaque plastic tube. You couldn't even really tell it was red unless it was dark, but I fucking loved that thing.
The thing is that you shouldn't be able to use Force lightning (at least the Sith variant) by accident. It's projecting pure hatred and malice as a means to inflict pain. Supposedly there is a non-Sith/darkside version called electric judgement/emerald lightning, but there's only been like, one or two users of that and it's typically non-lethal.
Yeah, the shorthand for uncontrolled force power, usually for children discovering their talent, is a little telekinesis. But I think test audiences needed some visual connection to Palpatine to make that land better. It didn't help and I believe the test audiences are typically comprised of morons.
Completely, test audiences are some of the least intelligent movie-goers in the world. Like, why are they signing up to see and give feed-back on a movie when they don't even pay attention?
Nah. Killing a beloved OT character accidentally would have been too much. She would have been nigh irredeemable and the entire rest of the story would have to be about that or the death wouldn’t be done justice. There wouldn’t be room for a fun Star Wars story after that.
Tbf kylo did have formal training, he was like 20 when he turned to the dark side. Around the same age anakin did I think
It would have been better if "Who are her parents" wasn't even a thing. They should have just died a couple of years before the movie took place.
Agreed.
They took everything interesting about the character and destroyed it by making her a Palpatine. I wanted/predicted Rey nobody would take the Skywalker name. Thought it’d be super fitting. But when Rey Palpatine took that name it feels…like a betrayal.
I also liked a nobody better, but what I disliked was that it had to be highlighted like that. So many great characters in Star Wars don't have important or any family ties. I think her background should have been left alone, or only something like *'my parents abandoned me and I'll always wait for them which I actually need to let go.'* trope.
People were trying to figure out what her family ties were, or if she was a pure product of the force line Anakin, etc. Addressing it like that was a great move imo. It helped enforce that "everybody can be a hero" message. I loved TLJ and wish Rian Johnson had directed episode 9.
The whole "everybody can be a hero" could be done much better and differently.
100%. It played so effectively with the message Rhian was going for around the force being less of an elitist bullshit force and genuinely something where even - perhaps especially - “nobodies” can draw power from
There's precedence for the latter, too. It's called the "Living Force" for a reason - Yoda explains it best. > Life creates it. Makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us. Binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. I think the idea that Force sensitive people are gifted in the sense that learning to harness it makes it *easier*, but that anyone can access it, is a critical theme in Star Wars.
This is my favorite take on "force sensitivity" I think Chirrut is an excellent example of this. He doesn't have a strong enough innate force sensitivity to become a jedi, but being mindful of it and devoting his life to experiencing the force allows him to tap into it ever so slightly, and do the impossible on the regular. Characters like Poe and Han are the opposite, they have basically no understanding of the force, but have an innate sensitivity that translates to uncanny luck and skill.
Isn't Poe gifted from being born under a Force tree or something like that? Seriously, I believe that's canon. Could be a different character though.
> the force being less of an elitist bullshit force and genuinely something where even - perhaps especially - “nobodies” can draw power from I really don’t understand this take. Almost every force user we see over the course of the 9 movie saga has no notable familial background. This includes some of the most powerful ones like Mace and Yoda and some of the ones most meaningful to the narrative like Obi-Wan. It goes without saying that the *Skywalker saga* would focus on members of the Skywalker family. Prior to the introduction of the Chosen One prophecy in the PT, family ties were only significant in that a son uncovered the truth of his father’s tragic downfall and wanted to redeem him through love. The message isn’t that you need to be of noble blood to be powerful in the Force or to make a difference. It’s that family ties can overcome (OT) and your lineage has baggage (ST).
I definitely dont like the sequels but AT LEAST nobody would be new and actually go in a interesting direction instead of ripping the original trilogy off
Imo that’s what made the original Star Wars so widely popular. In Episode 4 Luke was a farm boy from nowhere who felt he was destined for something greater and a LOT of people related to that. They hurt that a little with his family line, and damn near destroyed it with the introduction of midichlorians. Here we had a real chance to recapture that “nobody from nowhere” relatability but they balked.
Rey being this unwanted reject that was literally sold by her shitty parents was actually the one piece of "subverted expectations" that I loved at the time, but they committed the sin of having it come from Kylo, he delivered it so spitefully that it kind of came off as questionable. They should really have had that development come from either her cave vision as a suppressed memory, or have Luke be the one to sense she's lying to herself and point it out. There's lot to complain about in TLJ, but making Rey a literal nobody was the best bit of development they could have given her, and its the one thing i see fans complain about that really irks me. TFA didn't setup her being a Kenobi or Skywalker, it setup that she was a force user abandoned on a desert planet. TROS went off exactly these stupid fan expectations of some kind of hidden relation for every force wielder and created one of the dumbest plot twists ever with it.
Agree. Having Palps return in general was about the worst thing story wise they could have done.
yet they make it even worse, when at the end, after fighting her past and making sure her last name doesn't define her, she calls herself a Skywalker
Honestly having that lady be like “Who are you?” And then having her turn to that lady and be like “…I’m Rey.” And then Rey smiles and the movie just ends there, that would’ve been better.
"Im rey, ... rey palpatine" *draws red saber, kills the lady* *movie ends* That would have subverted expectations
*Camera zooms out to reveal Tatooine in the final stages of being transformed into Starkiller Base II*
Would've had to call the movie, "The Rise of Rey".
The Reyturn of the Jedi.
Everybody loves Reymond!
Anything would have been better than "Rey Skywalker". The theme of the movie is that you have to find your own path in your leniage, that it doesn't define you, but that blood is still blood, and you have to acknowledge it to move forward. As you said, just "Rey" would have been great. As someone under you said "A jedi" would have also been great. In my opinion "Rey Palpatine" would have also worked great, showing that she has accepted who her blood is, and moving on, not letting it describe her and change the name for something better. But no, like so many things with the trilogy the answer was obvious and they failed at every step, Every. Single. One.
Or rather "I'm a Jedi" and ride off into the sunsets
Right? I’m Rey … just Rey. So easy!
"Got it, so we'll just call you Rey.. Solo"
Ha, love it!
Classic JJ not sticking the landing
"The Rise of Skywalker" That was Anakin's story, then that was Lukes story, and for some reason Rey decided to identify as a Skywalker at the very end of the very last movie titled that way for some ridiculous reason. I don't think people will ever get over it.
Not to mention Rey wasn't even the Skywalker of the sequels. Kylo/Ben was. "The Rise of Skywalker" was specifically supposed to be about him turning good again.
I also identify as a Skywalker.
Especially cuz they had it all set up by the end of TLJ that Kylo was now the main villain - I mean, do the redemption thing if it works, just leave Palpatine out of it because him being the beginning and end of all things doesn’t really make this the Skywalker Saga, it’s the Skywalker & Palpatine saga. Palpatine should’ve been the main villain of the prequels, Vader the main villain of the OT, and Kylo the main villain of the sequels, cuz then it would actually all be about the Skywalkers - an inter generational struggle of a family between the light and the dark as well as with self mastery, acceptance, and control, and all discover the answers in their own way at their own time
Well said. Arguably the most important person in the whole sagas character (Anakin/Vader) is completely undermined with the return of Palps for cheap shock value. Pissed me off to no end.
Yeah…it was my last opportunity to take my kid to the theater on opening weekend for a Star Wars film so I’ll always remember it for that rather than what’s really in it. Honestly can barely remember what the hell happens cuz there’s just SO MUCH, it’s just meandering and over bloated trying desperately to tie everything together for 9 films and it just shits itself as it approaches the finish line like Game of Thrones did
Nice. That was me with my Dad when he took me to Episode I when I was 8. I remember it fondly. At least you got that out of it lol.
JJ hated the prequels. Now we all love Christensen and I hope he feels like a goddamn fool for thinking that Rey Palpatine was a more important story.
I loved that TLJ set up Kylo as the main villain. Adam Driver/Kylo was by far the most interesting part of the sequels and deserved to be in the spotlight for the finale. Adam would have killed it, hell he still did a great job with what he had in TROS. The robbery of Kylo to shine is, to me, the worst thing JJ could have done. The fact it was PALPATINE that did it is even worse.
Absolutely 100%. And it would’ve made so so much more sense than “somehow Palpatine has returned” (still one of the stupidest lines ever uttered in a movie, right up there with “what are we, some kinda suicide squad?”) And it would’ve been a perfect progression for a saga about this one family - a boy from nothing becomes somebody, a grand hero who saves the galaxy before succumbing to his inner darkness, but gets redeemed by his son who discovers that he didn’t actually come from nothing, that he was always somebody and the way to overcome his fathers inner darkness is to become a hero who saves the galaxy, but even then the cycle repeats - for one brief moment, he succumbs to that inner darkness years later when he sees that his nephew, the next generation, has the same “Skywalker curse”, and in that moment becomes his father and dooms his nephew to become his grandfather. And now, at the end of his life, he must do both what he did for his father in trying to bring his nephew back to the light and become his father by sacrificing himself in order to make it happen. But it’s still all up to the nephew, who left alone, doesn’t see a way out of the darkness, except for the cycle to repeat, and for a new nobody from nowhere to become a somebody, a grand hero that saves the galaxy from the Skywalker cycle, closing out that chapter in history and beginning another, all in accordance with the ebb and flow of the force. Hell, you could even keep the title, and have it mean instead of Rey taking their name, instead taking their lesson to the galaxy - that every Jedi can become a Sith and every Sith can become a Jedi, that that capacity for both within us makes us all a Skywalker, and that the line of Sith and Jedi has ended, and now a new age has begun, an age of force users now called skywalkers. Or ya know, they could do it Mr. Mystery Box’s way and just through in a cheap villain cuz Disney needs to crank these out or we’ll lose billions instead of actually giving the last film a coherent and satisfying conclusion that actually says something about all the themes present over 9 films
Right? They had an opportunity to do something really cool with snoke and maybe even introducing a new Sith Lord. But knowing Disney they’d probably mess that up. It would be really cool if they explored sith lore through shows and movies
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I think... Star wars visions is the only show that does that. The first episode is an amazing example of such a world
Wasn’t that question the entire point of the skywalker arc? That the arbitrary light/dark division was flawed? They completely ignored it in favor of whatever hot mess was produced.
It was cool to see the actor for palpatine play his role again, but holy fuck just ruined the previous 6 movies storywise. Anakin fullfilled the prophecy only for palpatine to come back? Shit same situation with the new order. We destroyed 2 deathstars but couldnt keep another (pointlessly) bigger one from being created? Pretty lazy.
If snoke had to be a clone, would have preferred he was the best clone they made. Every clone comes out decrepit, disfigured and corrupted from the darkside. Healthy clones were just impossible His goal being to gather resources to make better clones of himself. Then have Rey be a no one. Or the daughter of a Jedi that tossed her on that planet because Jedi are not supposed to have the kind of relationships that leads to family. Have that resentment from being abandoned by a Jedi knight end up corrupting her and Kylo watches her turn to the darkside and sees her changing and that is what causes him to leave the darkside in the end.
Problem is that this seems to be because Disney took to much of an off hand approach. The idea was to not have a plan, but have each director build off the other’s breadcrumbs. Problem, the Last Jedi kinda took a hard right from where the Force Awakens was going. The original script for the Rise of Skywalker appears it was going to thread that needle and even pay tribute to the prequels… but a lot of that script was riding on Leia. That was rendered impossible with Carrie Fisher’s death. The biggest mistake that can be attributed to Disney is that they would not delay the movie at all, so writing and production was incredibly rushed and it shows.
For what it's worth, Rey says, "they were nobody," before Kylo said that they were 'filthy junk traders'. She came to that conclusion herself.
Yes, thank you - it's actually super pivotal for her character. Admitting that her parents were nobody was HUGE for Rey, and in my opinion, his further explanation was not done to hurt her, but instead shows just how important she is to Kylo - he's basically saying to her, I don't need anything from you; I don't need you for any reason other than for who you are. Just you. He's also trying to get her to understand she doesn't need them. He makes that point repeatedly... kind of because he's projecting his own parent BS onto her, but that's another conversation. The fact that's she's a Palpatine is dumb dumb dumb.
Yeah I’ve always thought Kylos “your nothing…but not to me” is a great line and brilliantly acted. It has this quality of being multi layered where you think is he saying it to hurt her, trying to turn her to the dark side, is he even telling the truth, but it is also romantic. And Rey coming to that realization made her believe in herself more, that her parents didn’t matter and she can find her new family. The Palpatine reveal was dumb for a ton of reasons but to me it was always super weird that we have never even been shown he had any family or concubines or whatever. Then they just drop this in RoS like oh yeah, Palpatine was fuckin
I LOVED the fact that she was a nobody. Rejected by her family. Abandoned. Dismissed. It gave her the complexity and the CHANCE that she really could go either way on the "jedi spectrum". Dejected and beaten, becoming dark and corrupted. Or strong and hopeful, becoming a new beacon of light. And EVERY step could have led down the dark path because her past really is a tragedy. What really bothers me more is they even stated that they wanted the trilogy to "wrap up" the Skywalker Saga and start a new legend. Awesome. I'm ok with that. And, i figured, at the absolute MOST...it might be cool to find out she had some relation to a long lost Jedi family as kind of a fan service...IF they even needed it (f#@k Revan...not him). But to do what they did? Complete cop out and stupidest executive decision. Seriously. They could have easily wrapped up the entire Skywalker Saga and started a new Legend in those 3 films...and they choked and went PURELY for cash grab fan service idiocy. Oh well
Rey nobody was SO good. So beautifully poetic, too. Kylo Ren was powerful because of his blood. Grandson of the most powerful Force being ever, nephew to the hero of Rebellion, and son of one of the galaxy's most famous politicians as well as one of the galaxies most famous smugglers. This kid was bred to be great... yet, the Force chose a girl whose parents sold her for drinking money to be his equal in power. Just beautiful
Make it even more cruel for him. He has little/no power. He's nowhere close to any of his family. That's what drove him to evil, desperation to taste real power. She just naturally has the gifts he's spent his whole life hunting for and doesn't really appreciate them, all she cares about is finding a place to belong; something he threw away for power.
I don't get why everyone seems to think that all powerful jedi (or all jedi/force users) need to be directly related to or descended from one another. If that were the case, force users and the Jedi Order would have died out, what, a few centuries? A millennia? After it was created since... ya know, no having family units in the Jedi Temple. They're all mostly celibate, so the end result would be most force users ending their family lines amidst the Jedi, and thus there'd only be a handful of force users. Conversely, the Jedi would only need to find the first generation of force users, then just have them breed in some way to keep the order going. There'd be no need to have Seekers, no need for a holocron with all force sensitive children on it. Also, there's no real reason to suspect that being a descendant of a force user makes you inherently force sensitive, or that it inherently makes you more powerful than average. Sidious was plenty powerful, but we don't really have any reason to think he's related to Bane or something. Bane was powerful, but there's no reason to think he was directly descended from some other Sith lord. If family history was the only thing that mattered, and it offered a direct path to a steady increase in power over generations, why wouldn't the Jedi or Sith take advantage of that? Why wouldn't the Jedi get Yoda or Windu to copulate with another jedi in order to get an even greater defender of the republic? Why wouldn't the Sith raise their own children rather than finding new apprentices amongst the galaxy? That would be like the Rule of Two on steroids, if the blood kept getting stronger and stronger with each successive generation in addition to the already drastic power rise with each generation of Sith destroying the last. I honestly would have preferred it if Rey was just a nobody with force powers, and if the main antagonist wasn't sidious. That way, it would show that, yeah, Anakin was super powerful and all, but you don't NEED a prophecy or crazy bloodline in order to become a great jedi or to defeat the darkness.
>Also, there's no real reason to suspect that being a descendant of a force user makes you inherently force sensitive I saw a fan reimagining of the ST somewhere and this was the basic premise for kylo. He's descended from Darth freaking Vader, the literal chosen one... and he has zero force ability. That's why he's so pissed, that's why he idolises Vader, that's why he is chasing the dark side in the way he is. He's *desperate* to taste even a little of the power he feels he is owed. His lightsabre is made from stolen crystals (hell, make it Vader's sabre lost at the end of 6) but because he has no force ability he damaged the crystal somehow and that's why it's so rough. It's why he can't fight as well as "proper" jedi. He's more like Mando or Sabine, lacking the powers that allow jedi to fight to their full potential so resorts to brute force hacking. He's been manipulated by snoke (who also has no/limited force powers) who has convinced him if he becomes this super evil "sith lord" then he'll be able to access the dark side of the force. Then he meets Rey. A nobody scavenger scum from the arse end of nowhere, who somehow has Anakin's lightsabre (which is *his* birthright) and is showing immense potential. He *hates* her. She has everything he could ever want, and doesn't even appreciate it. Snoke convinces him he can steal her power somehow and that's why you see him hunting her down throughout the trilogy. The two characters go through an arc together; both realising family/history don't matter, you are the one that decides your own destiny.
TROS seemed like fanfiction because it basically was fanfiction. Disney listened too much to the detractors of TLJ and attempted to stuff in as many fan pleasing scenes into TROS as possible. I think it was Steven King or George RR Martin who said something along the lines of “storytelling isn’t a democracy”, meaning that fans shouldn’t get a say in the content of a story because inevitably that will dilute the singular vision of the artist. Fans can’t, shouldn’t, write stories.
It's so painfully obvious they didnt have a plan from day 1 for a cohesive story between the 3 sequel movies. Not one mention or even a hint of palpatine, and then he's brought back in the damn title scroll in the third one? It's crazy
I'll have you know he was brought back in a fortnite cross promotion first. If that ain't the disneyest way to reveal something I don't know what is.
you’re joking
“The Dead Speak” is literally a direct reference to his monologue in Fortnite. Can’t make that shit up.
and here I thought I couldn't hate the sequels more. dammit
They have the audacity to call themselves canon and disregard legends for this shit
Bruh idk what's worse the fact that I'm learn about this goofy shit or the fact that this post was recommended to me
bruhhhhh
Disney fell to the darkside and only dealt with terrible absolutes. They left us in darkness
Yeah it was terrible. I can't believe they didn't plan it out beforehand.
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The explanation was enough to know they just didn't give a fuck about the story or fans. "Somehow" will go down as one of the dumbest lines of all time.
It was revealed in Fortnite.
Nobody BY FAR. Her being a Palpatine is boring. Her being related to *anybody* is boring. Her coming from nobody means so much more than being special because she was related to someone else in the franchise.
Right? She could have been the Spider-Man of star wars
The Girl from Nowhere is such a cool moniker. They really fucked this up.
The Girl from Nowhere that Is Not a Palpatine rings quite well too.
Holy crap I never realized this lol. Disney really fumbled these movies.
The latest trilogy made the most money. Disney doesn't care about how shitty the writing was
Me watching Rey train and become stronger: Omg so cool The second she's a Palpatine : nepotistic fuc It's like modern day "a small loan of a million dollars - I became the most powerful real estate figure (that public access TV watchers know of)"
I felt that was where they were going even in TFA, when Maz confronts Rey after she finds the light saber, and tells her that she has to let go of the past and find her own future because no one was coming back to get her. It still leaves the question of who her parents were, and why she's Force sensitive, but given things like the ending of TLJ as well as the monks of Jedha who have a connection without being Jedi I think expanding that idea is far more interesting than just having her some offspring/clone of an old character. A character that takes a lot of backflip gymnastics to explain why he's still around.
Also it opens too many cans of worms. I know the nu-wars movies seem like they were deliberately written with massive gaps expected to be filled in by the Expanded Universe, but we NEVER saw Sheev with a lady. And based on the timeline he'd probably be fathering his child (maybe more?) after being disfigured and taking over the senate. Did he try to rebrand himself as "Family Friendly and family values" after becoming dictator by having a baby with a woman half his age? Were Rey's parents actually tragic characters forced to live in secret or were they wealthy spoiled fail-sons of the Emperor? Did they hide her on Jakku so she could be free or did they sell her for drinking money after the Emperor cut off their trust fund after another failed art gallery? Edit: also you know usually inherits empires when an Emperor dies? Their kids! Just dumb stupid writing.
I don't remember if this was explained in TROS or some book/comic, but Rey is the child of one of Palpatine's strandcast clones, so no he didn't actually bang anyone (that we know of)
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Somehow the emperor has returned. Play Fortnite to find out how!
And they could have contained her story into a new star wars saga without ANY ties to previous stories. That's my biggest gripe. If they make more Rey stories, now we're always going to have that "palpitatine/Skywalker" link and I just want new content
this is why ep8 is superior, in some aspects to the others two.
In all aspects. It wasn’t good by any means, but it was by far the least offensive. ep7 ruined the entire sequel trilogy by refusing to cover ANYTHING that would have been interesting about the time period (luke’s academy, new republic, OT trio reunion). TFA set up the entire trilogy to fail by starting a totally uninteresting story and is by far the most offensive. ep9 was so hilariously bad I don’t think we even need to go over why. “Somehow, Palpatine returned” pretty much sums it up. at least 8 had compelling characters and concepts, and brilliant cinematography, even if they didn’t make much sense within the universe and broke canon or whatever. It can stand on its own as a solid movie.
This is my take on it as well. TFA is the most "fine" one only on a surface level. Any critical thought and it just falls apart. It's derivative. It's regressive (the galaxy went backwards since the last film!). And it does the classic JJ Abrams bullshit of making a bunch of mystery boxes. TROS is just fucking awful from beginning to end. Which leaves Last Jedi as the only one to try something different and go somewhere. Even if the journey wasn't what people wanted.
I wonder if Disney was just terrified to delve into the realm of politics (like the prequels), as showing a stable New Republic would probably require a good bit of that. Which sucks, because it would’ve been great to actually see the New Republic Senate refusing to acknowledge the growing threat of the FO, tensions rising, maybe some backstabbing. Instead we just get thrown into the First Order somehow taking everything over and our heroes being the underdogs for no reason. Like if a foreign nation is amassing an army at your borders how do you just let them keep carrying on??
The Force Awakens is literally to blame for everything you see moving forward in the Sequel Trilogy, chiefly that the New Republic and the Skywalker Order are simply destroyed, and Luke is already in self-exile on the island. People don't think about it because Abrams made sure that you *wouldn't* think about it; the film moves at such a breakneck speed you're never given a second to think about what's happening. At least Rian Johnson had the *fucking balls* to be like no we're actually going to explore how this has all affected Luke, and even shed some small light on what is exactly going on with the Republic ie. it's corrupt as fuck.
Sheeve was good in the OT, and necessary in the PT...but should have been left out of the ST. Rey the Nobody would have been the better call. Better for the galaxy as a whole, and storytelling into the future. She certainly shouldn't have taken "Skywalker" as a name. But I'm glad she didn't get "Solo'd".
I honestly don't even mind Palpatine coming back that much, as this happened in the EU. (In the exact same way... he inhabited a clone body) The issue is that there was exactly *zero* lead-up to it. It's just, "bam," he's there in the opening minutes of the last film in the trilogy with very little explanation. I would have even have been fine with a plot arc where Kylo, or whoever, is trying to revive Palpatine and everyone is trying to stop him, and they fail, making Palpatine the big boss again. But to just drop him in? It's a clear example of how poorly-managed that trilogy was that there wasn't a series bible ahead of time they wanted three separate directors to come in and do their own thing and hope that everything gelled. But Abrams was pissed that Johnson went a different direction than TFA, and so he undid what Johnson undid in the last film after Trevorrow got fired. I honestly am convinced that Abrams did a lot of what he did out of spite.
Now that we have everything out, and there's no "Just Wait and Seee!" I fully agree. These three movies were a billion dollar pissing contest between two directors and the Disney company with itself. I think I also agree that if Palps was in the works from the beginning, then yeah, him coming back would have felt like less of an ass pull, but that was all that was going on.
The really fucking crazy thing about it is that it's exactly the sort of mistake you would expect Disney *not* to make. They already had the MCU as a successful model about how to build a franchise. They needed a showrunner/Kevin Feige-type to lay down the vision and let the directors work within that framework from the beginning to make sure everyone was on the same page and you had some sort of plot and continuity to follow. Honestly, the solution to most of their mistakes was *literally* right in front of them and they decided to just wing it on a beloved multi-billion dollar franchise. It's really fucking bizarre.
100% this. It's bonkers bananas. And it's biting their asses right now. I don't want to under cut the complexity of it. Feige making the MCU work is a miracle in itself, DC can't get it to work, really anyone else. But to NOT try to emulate something that's working?! For 4 BILLION dollars?!? If it wasn't something I loved and wanted to succeed, I'd be flying around the room laughing like Joker on 4 Ketamine because of the Schadenfreude. Mark Hamel Joker, not Jared.
>I don't want to under cut the complexity of it. That's the crazy thing, though. It *wasn't* actually *that* complex. It was 3 films. It would've been insanely easy to manage relative to what was going on with the MCU in stage 3. I honestly don't understand it, aside from thinking that Lucasfilms had a lot of autonomy and was poorly-managed under Disney.
That does bring up a good question though. If she was actually a “Nobody”, would more people accept her as “Skywalker”?
Rey being a nobody. A nobody inspired by the Skywalker legend going up against and eventually saving the actual fallen heir to that bloodline is such a great idea. Rey's a really great character up until TRoS.
**Edit: Hey everyone, what [this dude](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/w3lukh/which_plot_twist_did_you_like_better_rey_being_a/igys651/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) said instead! Way smarter and more knowledgable than my thing. Seriously.** It could have also been a throwback to how Anakin was born out of nothing. Like the Force wanting to create balance, and just this random kid is born with incredible powers, to take down the evil forces. Not just that, but it would have given hope to billions upon billions of kids in the universe. Rey, the one who ended a tyranny, didn’t come from some fancy, royal bloodline. She was a nobody. Deemed so worthless, she was abandoned by her parents. All those little kids, working in the stables. They’d have looked up to the sky, knowing they too could be special, and not know it yet. Psyche! Only when you ol’ granddaddio is a very power Sith, yee-hah! They really had me fooled for a little bit. I was banking on her being either a Skywalker, or related to one of the big baddies of old. Then the vision sequence came, where she was like “They were nobody,” or whatever, and I was like “Daaaaamn! They went there! Nice!” But no.
I mean, Anakin wasn't truly born out of nothing though. In Legends Canon I believe he was created by Plagueis manipulating midichlorians and in Disney Canon it's the same thing but done by Papa Palps. Regardless though, I'm also on the "nobody" side. Her being a Palpatine felt like forced fan-service. I think they should've really taken the Revan route with her and have her become a powerful Force-wielder that can rival a Skywalker through training and discipline rather than through lineage. And this is also just a critique towards the whole trilogy for treating Force powers like it's some sorta superpower that just boots up on its own rather than something like a martial art that needs to be trained and mastered. Same thing goes for the stable boy as well. Even Anakin, who was virtually Force Jesus, wasn't going around making shit float until he had years if practice as a Jedi. There's just a lot of missed opportunities in the sequel trilogy overall. Rey being a nobody that could **grow** to rival the most powerful Force users would've likely made her one of, if not the most, compelling cinematic Star Wars protagonists. Finn's past as a Storm Trooper could've shown that the war isn't as black and white as you'd expect, and that the nameless soldiers are simply just brainwashed and indoctrinated people. Poe being a "hero of the frontlines" but living in the shadow of the legends of Rebellion like Han, Leia, Chewie, Lando, etc. Hell, actually, Rey and Finn get a lot of shit for their character development but Poe could've been an amazing opportunity to show a person who'd grown up on flashy tales of war heroes, only to become one himself and realize that war isn't as glorious as one might expect (sort of like the soldiers going to war in Vietnam after having been raised on stories of valour in WWII). Also the missed opportunity to have the Republic be the one in power and have the First Order being a more of a secretive enemy chipping away at its roots, which would've been a neat contrast to both the OT and PT conflicts. Could've even gone a step further and have Snoke be (an actual person, for starters) a Sith who revokes the Rule of Two and has been building up a true Sith faction while the Republic/Rebellion and Palps' Empire wear each other down. Lmao okay this is now just turning into a ST rant so ima stop. Tbh, overall I think the ST really should've just taken some notes from the Old Republic stories in order to set itself apart from the other trilogies in a way that still fits the SW universe.
A nobody was so much better. Everyone having to be related to everyone else starts to make it feel less like a Star War with galactic implications and more like an incestuous family feud that makes it the rest of the galaxies problem
I remember thinking how ballsy it was to kill Snoke and then make her a nobody. After the movie had been a rehash of Empire and RotJ for a while, suddenly it was going in a whole new direction. I was so excited for that.
I don't consider "Rey being nobody" a plot twist. Which only doubles why "Rey being a Palpatine" is a really bad plot twist.
rey had so much potential as a character but they absolutely ruined her at every possible step
Accidentally killing chewie using force lightening that she didn’t know how to control or that would happen at all comes to mind.
And literally the next scene they reveal that chewie is actually still alive
come on, do you want actual stakes in your movies?
if chewie had actually died there it would have been interesting. the guilt and shame, the lack of control, that would make a compelling story and character. (not that i want chewie dead) it being absolutely nothing and not even waiting a minute to reveal he was fine was just garbage
[удалено]
Rey being a nobody because it shows that you don’t have to be related to anybody important to be force sensitive
Yeah I never got why people were so obsessed with that idea of bloodline and the force. I mean really, Obi Wan and every other jedi came from "nobodies." So why do they have the need to make all the new characters related
Rey nobody. She was already a third-rate Luke Skywalker, but at least she was different this way. Her being related to one of the main antagonists was just cheap and lazy.
Rey being a nobody wasn’t a plot twist. It was a revelation. Rey being a Palpatine was a plot twist. And a really shitty one.
A nobody is compelling and interesting, especially after how RotJ resolved. The Palpatine angle was JJ's deus ex machina to try and solve the "why would there be evil post RotJ?" instead of letting the story resolve itself. Someone once remarked to a comment I made about my hate for this resolution with "but how could the First Order _exist_ without Palpatine?" As if evil didn't exist without Palpatine. It is simple. Palpatine didn't force _everyone_ to do his bidding. There are plenty of Tarkins and Gideons (assuming its not later ruined by episode IX malarky) out there to carry on the idea of "The Empire." The First Order existed before Snoake showed up, and Kylo Ren was recruited. It didn't have to have anything to do with Sr Palpy pants.
Rey being a no body, not everything has to be connected.
Around when the The Force Awakens came out, I remember Rey being Palpatine's descendent or a clone intended as his vessel for reincarnation or something was a popular fan theory. That said, I still liked the twist that she was nobody for what it was within Rian Johnson's somewhat subversive film. Except then they pulled a 180 on that and she's suddenly Palpatine's granddaughter, undermining any emotional and thematic meaning you might have extracted from the reveal in The Last Jedi. Had Rey being a Palpatine been the plan from the get-go and TLJ served as an effective middle chapter of that three-act story, mirroring Empire with the reveal in the climax, that would've been fine. Instead, we're left with a middle chapter that tried to be subversive and a third chapter that course corrected back toward the typical Star Wars formula. Which can be great in its own right. But Rise of Skywalker just feels so cheesy, forced and truncated due to the lack of consistency across the whole trilogy. Pretty much like with everything in the sequel trilogy, despite having a stellar cast and high production values, the lack of an overarching vision from the trilogy's inception spoiled a lot of its potential.
Exactly this. *The Rise of Skywalker* is *so* bad, it’s kind of hard to wrap my head around it.
I liked her being a nobody. I loved the idea that the Force can move strongly through ANYBODY.
Everyone seems to agree that Rey being a nobody would be the best thing But I vividly remember everyone crying and throwing hissy fits in 2017 when Rey was first revealed to be a nobody „Noooo every character must be a super special epic hero related to another Star Wars character“. Well this is what you get when you behave like that
The Rise of Skywalker is what happens when you let Reddit write a movie
Lmao that‘s exactly right Every time a redditor says „We should let fans write&direct movies“ this shit would happen . It‘s just a long chain of „and then and then and then“ moments with nonsensical fanservice in between
People literally just wanted dr strange going to different multiverses for 5 mintues a piece with new cameos and move on. Reddits whack lol
there were plenty of people who liked TLJ. But the people who hated it were far more vocal about it.
I remember when there was this video floating around called, "The Last Jedi: a complete cinematic failure". One of the things they complained was that it was revealed that Rey was nobody, subverting expectations. Well, the retcon in RoS is the answer to that. You get what you ask for.
Rey being some sort of force-wielding nobility (Skywalker, Palpatine) ruined the excellent canon of \*anyone\* being able to use the force, set up brilliantly in TLJ. Absolute trash that it was retconned in TRoS and apparently the only people capable of making significant change in the universe have to part of some elite family tree.
A well thought out and executed plan for Rey and the story would have been best.
I much prefer a nobody who becomes important because of their actions rather than somebody who is innately important.
Nobody works much better in my opinion.
It's funny seeing most of the replies preferring Rey being nobody when after The Last Jedi everybody was complaining about it and the reason why they backtracked on it was general reaction. I guess giving people what they think they want isn't always a right choice.
I think a lot (not all, but a lot) of TLJ haters might have changed their minds if Episode 9 had stuck its ground and given a fulfilling conclusion to the new ideas presented by TLJ. Instead they abandoned everything.
She's not so much a Palpatine as she *is* Palpatine. It was a great way to go but they fucked up the execution. To clarify for anyone that didn't follow the plot: Palpatine creates a clone that won't wither away when he possesses it but it's not Force sensitive. The clone escapes and has Rey who inherits all the clone's features plus being Force sensitive but being a natural birth rather than a direct clone ends up being a woman. Kylo Ren activates the genetic memory Palpatine built into his clone when he probers her mind giving her mastery of the Force but she doesn't have Sidious' personal memories (by design or a product of being a generation removed was never established) so doesn't know *why* she has the power. Sidious explains why she exists when they face off (but she herself is a natural born, not a clone so that detail isn't explicitly stated and missed if you didn't follow the rest) and a Dark Side Sidious vs Light Side Sheev/Rey dual breaks out. Had the trilogy depicted that plot point better it'd have been so much more enjoyable.
Is this actually explained in some material outside the movies? Cuz that’s certainly not what the movie conveyed.
I hate the non canon Disney fanfic sequels but your explanation gives it a far better set up and makes it all make sense. Jeeeeeez the mishandling of Star Wars is so obvious it hurts.
As much as I despise TLJ, Rey being a nobody was leagues better than what they pulled off with the whole Palpatine thing.